SYNTAX & SEMANTICS CIRCLE

about

The Circle is a weekly forum dedicated to discussion of the descriptive, experimental, and theoretical study of syntax and semantics, featuring presentations of ongoing research by members of the Berkeley Linguistics Department and other departments, as well as discussion of previously published works.

when

Fridays, 3:10-4:30pm

where

Room 1303 (Dwinelle)

Recurring link.

organizers

Margaret Asperheim

Hei Vangz

 

University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics

Spring 2026

NEXT MEETING:

20 february
Alessandro Duranti (UCLA) (Location TBA)

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UPCOMING MEETINGS:

27 february
Madelaine O'Reilly Brown (Stanford University)

6 march
Career panel

13 march
Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)

20 march
Aslı Kuzgun (Stanford University)

27 march
No meeting! Enjoy the spring break ;-)

3 april
Yağmur Kiper (UC Santa Cruz)

10 april
Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley)

17 april
Wendy L. A. López Márquez (UC Berkeley)

26 april
Samba Kane (Stanford University)

1 may
Elise Kim (UC Berkeley)

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PAST MEETINGS:

13 february
Nikolas Webster (UC Santa Cruz)
Delayed argument saturation in Korean double ACC constructions

This work argues for an analysis of delayed internal argument (IA) saturation (with insights from Higginbotham 1985; J. Yoon 1990; Chung & Ladusaw 2004; Legate 2014), utilizing a high applicative head (APPL) as a general tool for introducing an IA into the structure (above the Root, but below Voice), effectively binding an unsaturated argument variable. Empirical motivation comes from Korean double accusative (ACC) constructions (DACs), and the structural challenges they pose for theories of argument structure (AS). I argue that Korean DACs, despite surface form similarity to double object constructions (DOCs), are underlyingly transitive: what looks like a lower IA is in fact an ACC-marked modifier (Jo 2024), which restricts the transitive predicate (Chung & Ladusaw 2004; Legate 2014). The 'affected object' constraint (Larson 1988; J. Yoon 1990; Tomioka & Sim 2005) that Korean DACs share with DOCs then arises due to both constructions having IAs introduced by APPL.

6 february
Yi-Chi (Yvette) Wu (Harvard University)
The decomposition of Philippine-type voice: implications for phasehood and movement

This talk takes a morphological starting point to Austronesian voice, and argues in favor of positing several distinct syntactic projections whose various combinations give rise to surface voice alternations (cf. Pearson 2005, Travis 2010). In particular, this includes 1) the functional projection Mood, responsible for (non-)finite and (ir)realis marking, and 2) functional projections M(iddle)T(opic) (cf. LaCerda 2020) and Appl (cf. Georgala 2012), responsible for argument advancement as a sort of 'leapfrogging' movement (Bobaljik 1995). Evidence comes from affix ordering of verbal morphemes, morphological decomposition in indicative and irrealis voice paradigms, and the distribution of voice markers in clausal complementation in Seediq and other Formosan languages. I will discuss the implications this has on phasehood and locality in movement, tentatively proposing that there are three phases in the clause: one for internal arguments, one for all arguments, and one for the finite clause. This is ongoing work as part of a dissertation on Austronesian voice in Seediq [Taiwan; Atayalic].

30 january
Freja Lauridsen (Lund University)
A modal in motion: On the emergence of the English modal mun

The Old English preterite-present verb (ge)munan, meaning 'to remember' or 'to be mentally active', is attested throughout the Old English period. Deriving from the Proto-Germanic preterite-present lexical verb munan, it belongs to a class of verbs many of which grammaticalised into modal auxiliaries during Old and Middle English. (Ge)munan itself appears to have undergone partial grammaticalisation, as suggested by numerous attestations of modal mun in Middle English and Early Modern English, before ultimately being displaced by the dominant English modals. A central question, however, is whether this modal development can be traced directly to the Old English verb (ge)munan, or whether (ge)munan instead fell out of use during the Old English period, with the modal mun entering English only later, in Middle English, through contact with Old Scandinavian, where munu had already developed future modal semantics - a view commonly assumed, yet unexamined, in the literature.

My roject addresses this hypothesis by examining the distribution, syntactic properties, and frequency of (ge)munan in Old English and mun in Middle English, alongside parallel munu-derivatives in Scandinavian, in order to determine whether the English modal mun arose through internal grammaticalisation or via contact-induced borrowing.

23 january
No meeting. Happy new semester!